On Saturday March 23rd, Israeli Jews from the Jewish community of Oporto who work in the real estate sector were once again the target of a public demonstration, which was authorized by the city's Municipal Council. The pro-Palestine demonstration was called in a peculiar way: "against the bombs in Palestine and the evictions in Oporto".

The organizers claimed that "Israeli capital, this capital formed in colonization, needs more, because the capitalist machine never stops exploiting. So this capital looks for new investments in other cities – namely, Oporto, Portugal. In the city and surrounding areas there are Israeli investments in the order of hundreds of millions, with prominent companies".

The communication of the organizers was followed by a list of names of Israeli Jewish real estate companies in the city of Oporto. The same had already happened on January 27th.

On that occasion, the Jewish community of Oporto made a formal complaint to the Republic's Attorney General and a sensitive question was provided: “Who will be responsible when a terrorist attack occurs against the Jewish community of Porto, its members, synagogues, Jewish museum, Holocaust museum and its other institutions? In a country with a population of 10 million people and about 5000 Jews (0.05% of the total population), most of them arriving in the last decade, the Jewish minority is already beginning to be accused of endangering fundamental rights of the Portuguese, such as the right to housing.”

Excerpts from that complaint:

“On January 27, 2024 (also the International Day for Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust), taking advantage of a demonstration for better housing in the city of Porto, elements of the Collective for the Liberation of Palestine, with the endorsement of this organization, displayed posters with the words "Neither Haifa, nor Boavista, drive out Zionist capital!" and "We do not want to be tenants of murderous Zionists!.

The reference to "Boavista", the area where the Kadoorie synagogue is located, the heart of the Jewish Community of Porto, is a direct attack on the Jewish community of the city. The same had already happened three days after the massacre of October 7, 2023, when that synagogue was vandalized, with inscriptions of "Apartheid" and "Free Palestine", in a concrete attempt to associate the largest synagogue in the country with the violation of human rights and not with Jewish worship and culture.

The reference to "murderous Zionist" landlords is a direct attack on the Israeli members of that community who work in real estate in the city of Porto, to which they contribute with entrepreneurship and new ideas. It should be noted that investment by Israelis constitutes a very small percentage of the real estate investment in the city.

The "murderous Zionists" referred to in the posters and the newspaper "Esquerda.net", are married people, with minor children who study in Portuguese schools, and who today are in danger, both in their physical safety and in their work. Invariably, as was common in the Soviet Union, the names of people to be hit, frightened and destroyed were published.

Replacing the word "Jews" with the words "murderous Zionists" (Zionists because they were born in and like Israel and murderers because they are supposedly killing innocents) is a Soviet technique from the second half of the twentieth century and is now followed by the extreme left associated with sectors of radical Islamism. This technique aims to attack Israel, or rather "the Jew of the nations", as well as Israeli Jews, who are called "murderous Zionists" and presented as speculators, parasites and dangerous to the homeland where they live and to the world in general.

Parading for hours in an organized demonstration in the Portuguese city with the largest Jewish community and many hard-working Jewish businessmen, displaying messages such as "We don't want to be tenants of murderous Zionists" and "Neither Haifa, nor Boavista, out with Zionist capital!", is not a problem of "placards" and "banners", for which the responsibility lies individually, but a problem of discrimination and incitement to hatred and violence,  against which the police should have acted immediately.

Accordingly, a criminal investigation should be opened in view of the facts and reasons presented above”, added the Community.